LIVING IN BRUCE GOFF’S MATERIAL WORLD

Shocking architecture eventually fades into the background. Like electricity or the automobile, modernism has been so thoroughly digested that it can be difficult to understand how new and radical it once felt. The work of Bruce Goff is different. Instead of looking commonplace, his endlessly inventive buildings from the midcentury seem stranger than ever. A young savant who got his start in design as a teen, Goff began an early correspondence with Frank Lloyd Wright, who encouraged him to preserve his wild imagination by avoiding a formal East Coast education. Instead, he stayed in Tulsa, drawing from the city’s thriving artistic scene before moving to Chicago to teach and open his own practice in 1935. Deployed in the Navy in 1942, he found new ways to use his skills, creatively reworking quoinset hut frames to form a chapel, bringing out beauty latent in the mundane. Landing back in Tulsa after the war, Goff embarked on a series of unique residential commissions throughout the Midwest. Colorful, twisting villas made of collages of unusual materials like ashtrays and tinsel, these exuberant works pursued a new architectural American vernacular, combining technological optimism, roadside novelty, and the overabundance of consumer culture. Over nearly a decade as its chairman, Goff reshaped the University of Oklahoma’s architecture school, influencing a generation of designers before being pushed out by McCarthy-era persecutions of gay individuals in positions of power. His extensive archives, art collections, and personal effects were donated to the Art Institute of Chicago, where Bruce Goff: Material Worlds, curated by Alison Fisher and Craig Lee, is on view from December 20, 2025–March 29, 2026. The exhibition is designed by the New York-based firm New Affiliates, who spent months diving into Goff’s legacy to develop a show that could bring the vibrancy of his spaces to this eclectic archive. Below, New Affiliates principals Ivi Diamantopoulou and Jaffer Kolb share how the show and Goff’s little-seen work could influence a new generation of American architects.

Jaffer Kolb: We also used these sectionally stepped platforms and display surfaces that recalled the midcentury interest in floors and walls that act as embedded furniture.

ID: It’s difficult to put furniture on a pedestal without it looking like a store. It felt nice to bring more domestic architecture into play. That’s how the stacked platforms came to be: looking at some of Goff’s conversation pits or sunken hallways. The floor raises itself for you rather than a pedestal that’s a discrete object.

JK: Architecture can’t be communicated only through models or drawings or photographs. One thing that’s interesting about Goff is how much the spatialization of the work is contingent on the materials. Between a model, a drawing, and a painting, you might get three material samples, like a carpet tile or a little hanging ball lamp. For some architects that wouldn’t really communicate what their work was about, but for Goff, it does. By juxtaposing materials with more typical architectural representations, we can produce some kind of spatial consequence or configuration.

It’s very rare for a museum to accession all of those “non-art” materials. The architectural historian Sylvia Lavin talks about this distinction between the flat file and other archives, where people are always looking at architects’ drawings, but a lot of how a design comes together is revealed in other correspondence and ephemera. The Art Institute kept his seashells, record collection, his clothing — how did you think about building an environment where those two categories could be in conversation?

JK: The first thing you see when you walk into the gallery is a tiny, mirrored disco ball. It’s a little artifact that produces this refracted light. Entering into a materially conditioned space is such a Goff move.

ID: There’s an aesthetic regime in Goff’s universe. It’s not just work; it’s the way he exists in the world. You see these little objects, but then you also see his collections of non-architectural materials — dolls, indigenous artifacts, his obsession with Japanese prints — and you start to see the way he designs and how he is in the world. But that was extremely difficult: how do we make this feel like a point of entry and not a little junkyard? We tried to amplify their presence. Every one of his objects has its own plinth. Before seeing much of the architectural work, it asks you to immerse yourself in a material world.

JK: We wanted to ensure that the artifacts weren’t isolated, but always seen through, against, and between other forms of more typical architectural representations. The fact of the matter is that Goff’s drawings were not sufficient to build buildings. A huge story about Goff is the labor. With the Bavinger House, his clients were two artists, and they used students from the University of Oklahoma to build it. They were all onsite figuring it out as they went along. As a way of designing and building it’s so novel and special, and that cannot be communicated through typical plans and sections.

ID: For example, we visited this one project of his, the Ford House. We had studied the house and seen all of the drawings, but when we walked in, it was nothing like we’d imagined. It’s really magical. You walk into the house and the first breath you take, you can smell the rope-clad ceiling after all these years. Even talking to the current caretaker of the home, there’s an intensity to living in a home that is so ad hoc. He had this amazing story of how Goff would show up and stick the marbles in the wall himself.

JK: Many of the houses were off the beaten path, done with clients who didn’t want typical contractors. I think that it ties into radical fairy stuff in the 70s. D.I.Y., figure it out. It’s highly idiosyncratic and only possible through the accumulation of different laborers that come together without a delineated plan. Building as an act of sociality, a barn raising. It’s roadside Modernism meets a quasi-rural collective building project.